Reviewing “18 Geeky Predictions — 2017 Edition”

Last year it was the first time that I published my predictions and reviewed them publicly. I enjoyed the intellectual exercise of thinking over and subsequently reviewing them. So here I am again, this time reviewing 2017, just before writing about 2018.

It seems like this time I was more conservative, because I got several more right (10/20) 😜

Following the same format as last year, here we go:

#1 Security

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[🤓 correct] Everybody will get hacked: governments, cities, business, apps, SMBs… We will learn to live with it :)

There are some high profile projects that are under-delivering, but I don’t know how many projects have been abandoned. To be honest, today, I don’t think this is an important question. If ICOs are going to follow a similar distribution as VC, it will be a power-law, where the only thing that matters is to be involved in the successful ones.

[💀 fail?] My bet is that the geekier ones will get traction 🚜 — ie. security certs, distributed storage, etc. — we should invest in them!💰

There are already some contenders for the main layers of technology infrastructure for the decentralised world — kudos to Alexander Lange for putting together this map.

In our portfolio, Algolia and Contentful made it to the headlines by raising $53m and $28m respectively. Well done! 🤑

[🤐 dunno] Every developer will have a side SaaS business :)

It’s hard to get data on this.

One proxy could be to look at the results of Hacker News. There, the number of articles about bootstrapping or side project topics didn’t grew much (400–600 a year, 2016 and 2017). In google trends is also a pretty flat trend.

#4 ML, AI

[🤓 correct?] ML will get commoditised.No researchers needed. We will see it everywhere

Definitely, it’s in every pitch 🤠.

AWS et al are “democratizing” the access to ML, but some problems still require highly technical skills.

[🤐 dunno] The “war” in ML will be about training data. “How do we acquire more for initial training?” “How do we create more?” “How do we tag it in a smarter way?”…btw, now that people will stop thinking about improving ML algorithms, somebody might win by doing better algorithms…

I will not call it “war”, but startups with proprietary data — or smart ways to obtain it—get extra points from investors. 😘

This seems to be the beginning of a great new platform. If you’re building something into this space, my colleague Savina van der Straten has been writing about why we are so bullish about voice as the next platform here, here and here.